1 SEPTEMBER

Seven days after abandonment

6

‘I asked you to do one thing, look after your brother. Was that so much? After everything that’s happened, everything we’re going through right now, you couldn’t do one simple job?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Agnes said. ‘I tried.’

‘Did you?’ her mother demanded. ‘Because I need to know I can count on you. It’s just the two of us, in case you hadn’t noticed. You and me against all . . . this.’ She thrust her hands at the caravan. ‘We’re all we have.’

There was a small, familiar pause like the pothole in a much-travelled road. You steered around it if you were quick. If you weren’t, what came next rattled your teeth.

‘You’ve not forgotten?’ Ruth dropped her voice. ‘What I told you the night we came here?’

Agnes hadn’t forgotten. Just shoved it to the back of her mind, as if that were a safe hiding place for her mother’s secrets, like the shed for Christie’s loot. She felt with her tongue for an old pain in one of her back teeth. A sound came from her mother like the hiss of a zip, sealing Ruth tight. She’d seen Christie’s limp, how pale he was, on guard against her questions, siding with Agnes. That’s how it looked, how it felt, to Ruth.

‘Nothing happened,’ Agnes said.

Her mother laughed, incredulous. ‘Nothing?’

‘Today, I mean. Nothing happened today. We went for a walk. Christie slipped on the path.’

She knew her brother had told the same lie. They’d practised it together.

Ruth knew it was a lie. She rubbed the skin between her eyebrows as if this were the source of her pain. ‘Why did you come back to us?’

Agnes probed her bad tooth with the tip of her tongue. ‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know? You came back because you needed us. Needed me. And we loved having you home with us, of course we did, but you had to start pushing at every little thing that looked wrong, making it bigger and bigger until none of us could ignore it—’ She broke off, biting shut her lips as if she’d shocked herself.

The caravan was too small for this fight, Dad and Christie just a few feet away. Agnes wanted to be outside. She wanted to go with her mother to the trampoline trapped in the hedge, take turns punching it until the pair of them were limp and empty from exhaustion.

‘It was wrong. The houses, all the things I was saying . . . Those houses were wrong.’

‘If it’d just been the houses, we could’ve—’ Ruth stopped, swerved. ‘I know you can’t help it. I know you try. We’re both trying. It’s just too much sometimes. For me, it’s too much for me.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Her heart hurt. ‘I thought a walk would do us good. It was just a walk.’

Her mother knew how hard it was for her to lie. Sometimes that meant she believed the lies, imagining Agnes incapable of telling them. But sometimes it made her angrier. She let out a sigh, moving her hands towards Agnes before stopping short. How many times had she told the story of how her daughter couldn’t bear to be hugged? But that wasn’t Ruth’s fault. Everything couldn’t be Ruth’s fault. Laura had tried to make Agnes see that during their many talks in London: ‘Your dad was there too, when he wasn’t away working. Your teachers should’ve spotted something was wrong. It wasn’t all on your mum.’ She and Laura had fought over it, in the end.

‘Agnes, please. I need you to help with this. I can’t do it on my own,’ her mother was saying. ‘Your dad’s no use right now, you can see that. I need you to watch out for Christie, there isn’t anyone else. But if it’s too much, you have to tell me. I’ll understand but I have to know.’

Another mother would’ve demanded Agnes go out to work while she stayed home. But Agnes wasn’t like other twenty-nine-year-olds. Mum had to worry about her as well as Christie and Dad.

‘It’s not too much to ask. Christie gets bored in the caravan, though. It makes him miserable. It’s hard keeping him inside. I am trying, honestly, but it’s hard.’

‘Maybe if I take the two of you into town with me every so often? You could look around the shops, go to the harbour, see the fishing boats.’

Boats, people, cars. Colour, noise, crowds.

Her armpits were wet. ‘That sounds good.’

‘The shops aren’t much but there’s a Smith’s. He can get a comic.’

There wasn’t any money for comics. They were surviving on tinned food. ‘He has comics and books back at the house.’

‘We don’t have access to the house.’ Mum pushed her hair behind her ears, her face snapping shut again. ‘You know that. The whole place is sealed off.’

It’s not, Agnes wanted to tell her, it’s wide open.

‘Maybe once the investigators get to work . . .’ Ruth stared out of the window, across the caravan park. ‘I should chase them again, find out what’s happening.’

Nothing’s happening. This is it. The mud and duckboards. Dad sitting on the sofa. Christie getting angrier and angrier. You, worrying yourself to death. And me fighting you, making it worse.

‘I could go, if it’d help. Back to London. Laura will let me sleep on the floor.’

The idea made her tremble, a high-pitched ringing in her head. She’d thought all the phantoms were at Blackthorn Ashes but there were ghosts right here, between her and Ruth. There’d always been ghosts between them.

‘She messaged me after the evacuation. She’d seen it on the news, wanted to know how she could help.’

Agnes had messaged back, saying she was fine, afraid Laura would come out here and get sick like the others.

‘She’d understand if I needed to go back.’

‘You can’t go. You have to be here, we all do.’

‘For the investigation?’

Ruth turned away, her cheek rigid. ‘For everything.’

They made supper together, sitting with Dad and Christie at the kitchen table to share the meal. Mum talked about the jobs she’d seen advertised in town: till assistants, warehouse staff. She’d been a marketing executive, running multiple client accounts. When Blackthorn Ashes began to struggle, she took on the task of raising finance so the building could continue; confidence in the project was collapsing, slowly at first then faster, like coastal erosion when storms keep hitting.

Dad and Christie ate in silence. The caravan’s windows were grey, steamed up from the stove. It was like sitting in a cellar.

After supper, she washed up while Ruth sat at the table going through job ads on her phone. Christie disappeared to the bedroom, Dad to the sofa, an open book slack in his lap. When the work was done, Agnes took her jacket from the door. She liked to go out at this time. During the day, everything was glaring, all the edges hard, but the dark was so soft you could lean into it.

In Bette’s caravan, the TV was on.

Agnes pictured Errol and Bette sharing a bowl of popcorn, his hip tucked neatly into Bette’s side. She turned away, shining her phone’s torch to the duckboards and then to the hedges.

Everything was different in the dark, all the thorns blunted and branches smoothed to soothing patterns along the cliff path. She could smell the sea rolling out there, volatile and electric. Distant lights winked on tankers sailing so slowly they looked anchored to the horizon. Her skin stopped itching, at last. During the day it was maddening – the sensation of being in the crosshairs of a stranger’s attention. Or someone who wasn’t a stranger, someone she’d known when she was sixteen, holidaying with her parents, Mum about to give birth to Christie. If she squinted, Agnes could see her sixteen-year-old self walking barefoot on the sand.

The moon was up, licking the path white under her feet.

Up ahead, the trampoline creaked in the hedge.

The barefoot girl was gone but on nights like this Agnes felt her moving under her skin, hot behind her eyes. She’d never gone away, not even in London. The tiny flat she’d shared with Laura was the first place she’d felt truly safe. Except safe had been so strange. Alien. She kept searching for its edges, where it ended and she began. Safe was too much and she ruined it. Not deliberately – as if it were a favourite jumper she’d worn to death because she loved it, worn through its elbows and unravelled its cuffs until one day it fell to shreds.

She crouched to pick a pebble from the path, rolling it across her palm until the panic receded. The darkness soaked up her strangeness, washing it away. When her pulse was steady, she faced the sea and spoke their names, the way she had every night since leaving Blackthorn Ashes.

‘Tim Prentiss. Valerie Prentiss.’

Pausing between each name to picture the face that went with it.

‘Emma Dearman. Felix Mason.’

Drawing the details out of the darkness.

‘Chloe Mason. Sasha Mason.’

Until the path was peopled with the ghosts of those who’d died in the homes her father sold. Ruth wouldn’t allow him his guilt. It was nobody’s fault, she kept saying. So Agnes brought his pain here each evening: the six ghosts whose names he was afraid to speak. His silence took up all the space in the caravan, every surface and cupboard that wasn’t already filled with the things her mother had salvaged from their home in Blackthorn Ashes. It was too much for him to carry alone.

Tim and Val, Emma and the three children, Chloe’s hand in her brother’s, sticky fingers squeezing tight. Agnes stood with them until she couldn’t stand it any longer, until she wanted to scream and shove and fight her way free.

The wind found her, standing at the end of the path where gorse grew out of the stone, the sea seething softly in the darkness.

She’d loved the sea from the second she first saw it.

‘You walked right out to meet it,’ Ruth had told her. Agnes saw them hand in hand, making their slow way towards the sea, her baby self stopping to watch wet sand sucking at their footprints.

‘That was you,’ Ruth told her. ‘Scared of nothing, meeting it head on.’ Then she said something Agnes never forgot: ‘They say there’s no unmoving point in the universe, nowhere we can fix our focus. But I fixed mine on you and sometimes, just sometimes, you fixed yours on me.’

Everything was different now.

Agnes wasn’t a fixed point, for Ruth or anyone else. She was like the rest of the universe, spinning to infinity.

Gorse creaked at the cliff’s edge, growing from a crop of stone that bit like teeth if you pushed your hand against it. Bracken can grow through stone. Like acid grassland, it has to be beaten back to preserve historic sites. She could feel it pushing – the living landscape beneath the rock, centuries old and savage.

She turned to look back at Indigo Park where light from the trailers lay like dust on the hedges. Her mother was there, alone with Dad and Christie until Agnes returned. A memory came to her: a tender, living thing with teeth and claws. Her mother standing by an upstairs window in the house where Agnes was born, staring out at nothing. Agnes was five, maybe six. She watched through the gap in the door, afraid to break her mother’s silence. Ruth looked like stone, like a statue. Any second, Agnes was certain, she’d see a crack running down her mother’s face, splitting her in two.

It’s up to us, Ruth had told her on the night they were evacuated from Blackthorn Ashes. The two of us. We’re all we’ve got.

On the cliff path, her lips were tacky, tasting of salt and iron.

The sea beat against the rocks, her mind feeling the same. Black and treacherous, stewing with an oily mix of past and present, gritty as if old sand had found its way inside her clothes from that summer long ago. She unzipped her coat to pull her T-shirt from her neck, shaking it to get rid of the sensation. The itch was back, that sense of being watched. She turned a slow circle on the path, searching, but the ghosts were gone. No one living was in sight. Only blackness and the warring, warning sound of the sea.